ABSTRACT
One of Merleau-Ponty’s most important ideas is his thesis that the body is a form of consciousness. As we have seen, both variants of Objective Thought – Empiricism and Intellectualism – conceive of the body as a physical object, which is answerable to causal laws, and does not differ in any significant respect from other physical objects like tables and rocks. Empiricism takes consciousness to be the result of causal goings-on in the body. Intellectualism argues that consciousness cannot be understood as the outcome of causal processes. However, since it accepts the notion of the body as a mere physical object, Intellectualism has to conceive of consciousness as non-physical. Merleau-Ponty argues in contrast that the body cannot be thought of as a mere object. Instead, it is a subject: a form of consciousness. Moreover, bodily consciousness underpins those states and activities that we tend to think of as mental, for example beliefs, desires, thinking. Bodily consciousness is manifest in perceiving and acting, and it is through his analyses of perception and action that MerleauPonty develops his notion of bodily subjectivity. An important part of his discussion of these topics focuses on a pathological case studied by Goldstein and Gelb (1920): a First World War
veteran named Schneider whose brain was injured by shrapnel. Much of this chapter will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of Schneider, although I will also refer to ideas developed elsewhere in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Typically, Merleau-Ponty does not present an explicit, fully worked out theory or set of principles at the outset. Instead, he begins with some initial ideas, then slowly develops and refines them through the course of the discussion. His conceptions of perception and action thus emerge gradually as he considers Schneider’s case.1
